Books About Gaza and Israel and Jewish American Identity in Crisis
According to the version of Jewish history that I grew up with, Jews are not people like everyone else. This idea would never have been stated so succinctly, but many Jewish children were given to understand that we were special. An American Jewish child, Philip Roth once told an Israeli audience, inherited 'no body of learning and no language and, finally, no Lord — which seems to me a significant thing to be missing.' Instead, one got a psychology. 'And the psychology can be translated into three words — 'Jews are better.' This is what I knew from the beginning: Somehow Jews were better. I'm saying this as a point of psychology; I'm not pronouncing it as a fact.'
If our history had been ghastly, persecution had come with a compensation, bequeathing us a unique sensitivity to injustice, a determination to heal the world arising from a purer set of motives that had perdured even in the absence of faith, as well as a dispensation from the rules that govern the behavior of other people.
This is the narrative that the journalist Peter Beinart confronts in the opening pages of BEING JEWISH AFTER THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA: A Reckoning (Knopf, 172 pp., $26). The book is addressed to a progressive friend with whom Beinart has fallen out. After Oct. 7, he writes, 'one of our closest family friends asked my wife whether we believed that Israel bore any responsibility for the carnage. She answered yes. He said he would never speak to us again.' Every Jewish person who has spoken out on Palestine has such a friend, someone who believes that Jewish virtue translates into Israeli virtue, and exempts that state from the normal laws of humanity.
'We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated, with the support of many Jews around the world,' Beinart writes. 'Its central element should be this: We are not history's permanent virtuous victims. We are not hard-wired to forever endure evil but never commit it. That false innocence, which pervades contemporary Jewish life, camouflages domination as self-defense.'
For years, and at great personal cost, Beinart has been one of the most influential Jewish voices for Palestine, even as he continues to attend a predominantly Zionist Orthodox synagogue. Beinart is often praised as courageous for speaking out on this subject, but the most courageous thing about him might just be his simple assertion that Jews might be 'fallible human beings.'
Beinart used to describe himself as a 'liberal Zionist,' a position he has since left behind. He is sympathetic to the Jewish sense of vulnerability — he offers a granular accounting of the Hamas attacks — while nevertheless condemning the Israeli state. 'Again and again, we are ordered to accept a Jewish state's 'right to exist,'' he says, arguing that 'the legitimacy of a Jewish state — like the holiness of the Jewish people — is conditional on how it behaves.'
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